Gigabyte 890FX-A UD7 Review
Test Setup and Overclocking
Published: 5th October 2010 | Source: Gigabyte | Price: £170 |
Test Setup and Overclocking
Our test setup consists of our standard AMD test rig. We'll also be comparing the UD7 to our two most recently tested AMD platforms, the MSI 870A Fuzion and the ASUS Crosshair 4 Extreme. So our graphs are all at stock, but we've included an overclocked result for the UD7, just to show the benefits you can have if you wish to go down the overclock route.
Gigabyte 890FXA-UD7 Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X6 1090T BE 3.20GHz Processor
Corsair Dominator GT 4GB @ 1600mhz
ATi Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5 Graphics Card
Corsair AX1200w PSU
Windows 7 Home Premium x64
Overclocking
Overclocking on the UD7 was slightly different to most other AMD boards we've tested recently. It just took a little bit longer to work your way around the settings and discover what exactly the board needed and where, to get the maximum out of it.
But as you'll see, it's worth the extra effort.
There are three major elements that go into an AMD overclock, so our first task was to find the highest that each would reach, before consolodating them into our final overclock.
Here we have a very nice 3240.1MHz on the HT Link.
Regardless of the various tweaks and adjustments that have occured over the years, to a certain degree it's still all about the speed of the Bus. The UD7 gives us an exceptional 380MHz which really should give us a good overclock on our 1090T processor.
The Northbridge responds equally well with 3250MHz the best stable clock we obtained. If you're one of those people who loves good memory speeds, the UD7 has you covered there too.
So with plenty of overhead available to us from the three main elements of the overclocking process thanks to the quality of the major parts in the UD7, our best stable overclock, and that which we'll be using for our overclocked tests on the following pages, was 4.185 GHz. Not shabby at all and a couple of hundred MHz better than we saw from either the Crosshair or the Fuzion. It's not so easy to get there as those two boards, but definitely worth the extra time.
The main problem with getting the overclock is that the exceptional Bus Speed we saw above just couldn't be held at higher CPU speeds. Having a major Bus Speed is all well and good if it is easy to keep stable when the processor multiplier is increased again.
Still we got a great overclock and that's the important thing.
Most Recent Comments
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Originally Posted by AMDFTW
shame it has no lucid chip as this would of been awsome |
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Originally Posted by AMDFTW
as its new tech and it seems odd to go back to normal with just usb3 and sata6 |
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Originally Posted by AMDFTW
i reckon most people will opt for the MSI IMO |
but thats just my opinion fella
After all, we all know that people have brand loyalty and the Lucid Hydra setup is really only beneficial for people with two high-end graphics cards from the competing manufacturers. Which only accounts for a nth of the potential audience.
All three are very good boards, with slight variances depending upon personal taste.
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